Subject Relative Production in SLI Children during Syntactic Priming and Sentence Repetition

Moreno Coco, University of Edinburgh

Maria Garraffa, University of Edinburgh

Holly Branigan, University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLIC) experience
difficulties in processing Subject relative clauses (SRC).
This has been interpreted as evidence that they lack syntactic
representations for SRC. Our study investigates the spontaneous
production of SRC in typically developing children (TDC) and
SLIC in a structural priming paradigm, and compares their
performance in a sentence repetition task. We demonstrate
that SLIC are much more likely to produce SRC during priming
than in sentence repetition; moreover, when primed,
their performance matches TDC's baseline (unprimed) performance.
Furthermore, we design two simple unsupervised Bayesian models,
and predict the developmental group (SLI, TD) and priming condition
(Primed, Non-Primed). Overall, this study shows that
SLIC can spontaneously produce SRC when primed, suggesting
their impairment is related to working memory, rather than a
deficit in syntactic knowledge.